A lot of PHP developers (both on the PHP4 and PHP5side) need image transformation operations for various tasks, the most mundane of which are the proportional resizing and watermarking. Most of them strive to make their projects and scripts run on as many platforms and evironments as possible. You can find various scripts about image transforming operations utilizing all the availble environments, but they lack a centralized approach towards using them. The best thing you might get is PEAR::Image_Transform, but it is still in its alpha stage and the latest release was more than year and a half ago. Since more of the recent projects I was involved in required such image transforming functionality that will work on various platforms and enviroments, I decided to create the Asido library. Asido is open-source and its LGPL license allows you to place the class in your proprietary PHP projects (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.php).

As promised, Asido has ditched the PHP4 compatibility and is now purely PHP5. The old hybrid PHP4/PHP5 version is branched in SVN under /branches/asido-php4-php5 for all of you that still want to play with it. The new version works OK with E_ALL|E_STRICT. However, this first PHP5 version of Asido does not take advantage of all the wonderful features that PHP5 offers. I hope that in the next release (which will be PHP5-only), Asido will use PHP5 at its full potential.

Finally we have a worthy „record“ in Asido Project downloads, the one we have been waiting for the last two months – our 1000th download! Probably there will be new records when we update our tutorials/howto section, move entirely to PHP5, as well as putting out a new release of Asido.dead and gone download

To take advantage of the many and amazing new features of PHP5 it is decided that effective February 5th, 2008, newly released versions of Asido will only be developed and supported for PHP versions 5.2 and greater.

To sum it up: you might have heard of it, or not, but it is going to be a hot topic now since the news today about ceasing support for PHP4 since the end of this year. GoPHP5 is a strong initiative which is trying to push for vital change in the PHP community (even before the news about the „death“ of PHP4). PHP is (still) major now. Neverthelss, PHP5 has been ignored by the majority of hosting companies and large projects for far too long now. Given that PHP6 is coming our way it is about time companies let go of the past and embrace a change for the better. With a lot of companies refusing to upgrade, developers are forced to provide support for PHP4 (including Asido and Krumo). On the other hand with developers still doing so much of PHP4, hosting companies are reluctant to upgrade. It’s a vicious circle… or it was – until the news today about PHP4 kicking the bucket.

Finally, the website for the Asido Project is completed! An efford was put to try to deliver this site at top speed and not compromise the site content or the layout. There were several glitches choosing the platform and applying the modifications, but after one week customizing the final look and functionalities, and about two weeks writing the content, the site is finally up and running 🙂

After switching several CMS platforms, this website is built by using WordPress 2.1

. The modifications and the customizations were tough, but now since everything is completed I must admit that the WordPress administration is very easy. So, enjoy the Asido site, and expect a lot of new examples added to the Howtos section.